[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Even Rouault, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Michael Sumner, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 09/26/2024. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

Discussion Items
----------------------------

* Two bronze sponsors have declined to renew for this year. If your organization depends upon GDAL, and you value the efforts of the GDAL Sponsorship Program for maintenance of the project, please continue to advocate for your organization's sponsorship of the project. Sponsors will necessarily come and go, but sustainment of the GDAL Sponsorship Program depends on users advocating the need and value of their organization's participation in it.
* GDAL TracWiki is dead. If there was a resource you used there you can't find in the existing website or GitHub space, please file a ticket with a link to the wayback machine and we will make sure to pull it back from the ice age.
* A discussion about whether or not libkml maintenance should fall under purview of GDAL maintenance activity. If libkml usage is a high priority for your organization, please reach out directly to Even.
 
Maintenance activities update
------------------------------------------

Alessandro

* PR reviews
* More ArgParse implementation, specifically gdal_rasterize
* Investigation of gdal_contour behavior change https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/issues/10854

Dan

* RTD migration is now complete! Some follow-on work that might continue there is to backport some older doc versions for availability on the website, but that is not slated for implementation at this time.
* Significant Python bindings ReadAsArray Numpy performance improvement
* gdalwarp behavior investigation and documentation
* discussion about simplification and consolidation of gdalwarp code

Even

* 110+ tickets of activity and review
* Addition of a CI check of final GDAL tarball to ensure unexpected binaries are not added to release output
* Additional gdalcolor interpretations and enumerations
* RFC 101 Thread safe GDAL raster dataset reading
* VSIMem "random" filename generation
* Enhancement of build configuration modularity, including the ability to disable *every* driver if desired (MEM only!)
* Spite-driven development of libertiff, a header-only TIFF C++ library https://github.com/libertiff/libertiff/ 
* libtiff 4.7.0
* New EMBED_RESOURCE_FILES CMake configuration to take advantage of if-available C++23 compiler support for embedding GDAL_DATA and (eventually) PROJ_DATA content directly into the build
* Significant performance improvement using column API for some ogr2ogr reprojection activities

Javier

* Discussion about templatization of interpolation to adapt eigen-like behavior https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/10744
* Google juice of spatialreference.org <http://spatialreference.org/> is improving. It is now #2 for most queries. It is #1 for being the most the up-to-date, no ads, no-fuss, and easy-to-consume spatial reference definitions website in the world :)

Michael

* Discussion about pangeo/xarray, adaptation of GDAL's warper in other contexts, and "lazy coordinate" consumption

Howard

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 10/24/2024 at 13:00 UTC. Any GDAL PR contributors are welcome to join by reaching out to me for an invite.

Howard